wave of settlement activity did not begin until the late 1820s, with the arrival of the first significant numbers of Irish settlers to the Newtown Cross and Iona areas of Belfast. By 1842, this second wave of immigra— tion had slowed, and the 1842 Census of Prince Edward Island indicates 157 Irish natives living in the Iona, Newtown Cross area.

For the most part, the early Irish immigrants came from the southeast counties of Ireland, principally from the port cities of Cork, Waterford and Wexford. Later, smaller numbers of immigrants came from the more northerly counties. It is important to note that the bulk of the Irish settlement in the Belfast area predated the infamous potato famine, the principal reason many Irish left their native land and came to North America in the mid—decades of the 19th century. In his examination of the Iona Irish, Father Arthur O’Shea points out that, much like their Scottish counterparts in Selkirk’s 1803 expedition, the Irish who came to the Belfast district were poor, but not destitute.‘

Place Names

It has always been a source of amusement if not confusion, that the predominantly Scotch Presbyterian district of Belfast is named after an Irish city and the predominantly Irish Catholic community of Iona is named after an Island in the Scottish Hebrides.2 In the instance of Belfast, the choice of name was made prior to the arrival of the eventual inhabitants. In his exhaustive examination of Island place names, Geo- graphical Names of Prince Edward Island, research toponymist, Alan Rayburn, attributes the naming of Belfast to Captain James Smith of the HMS Mermaid. Contrary to the popular belief that the name is derived from the French “belle face”, or the equally popular notion that the community received its name after an incident involving a church “bell” which rolled off a wagon in transport and came to rest “fast” in a swamp, Rayburn authoritatively insists that it was, in fact, the Irish seaport which Captain Smith had in mind when he named the Island community in 1770.

1. For more information on the Irish of Iona, see Father Arthur O’Shea - “The Iona Parish” in Abegweit Review, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1988.

2. In its early years, the area now called Iona was known variously as: Montague West, Montague Cross and Irish Montague. Its present name was given in 1901 by Father James Phclan, perhaps to commemorate the work of the great Irish saint, Columba, who had established a missionary monastery on the Scottish island of Iona in the 6th

century.

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